That is an excerpt from Global Politics in a Post-Truth Era. You may download the book freed from charge from E-International Relations.
Since 2016, when the Oxford English Dictionary chosen post-truth as its Word of the 12 months, it has develop into commonplace to say that we have now entered an era of post-truth politics. On this chapter, I argue that, although the term post-truth could also be relatively recent, the social and political culture that the term denotes – a culture during which public opinion is just not shaped by fact-based arguments a lot as by reality-creating chanting of talking points – has been evolving for at the least a century, if not longer. What could also be recent concerning the present is just not that we have now entered a recent era characterised by the repeated assertion of talking points a lot as that post-truth has itself develop into one in every of the talking points that saturate our discourse. Moreover, I argue that the evolution of this post-factual culture has been pivotally shaped by the domestic politics of US foreign wars, most notably the campaigns to sell to the American public the US interventions in Europe in 1917 and Iraq in 2003.
I first sketch the propaganda campaign orchestrated by the Wilson Administration in 1917–1918 to rally support for the war effort. Public chanting of anti-German talking points was an integral a part of the campaign. I then discuss how wartime propaganda methods were later transplanted to the realm of mass marketing. Industrial and political promoting campaigns have come to consist not in communicating facts about products or political candidates a lot as in constant repetition of logos and taglines. When such campaigns succeed, they perform speech acts, that’s, their taglines develop into the product (or candidate) they ostensibly confer with. Finally, I explain how such marketing practices returned with a vengeance to the foreign policy sphere within the Bush administration’s campaign to mobilise public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The campaign’s central tagline was Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’. This ambiguous phrase – chanted by the administration and echoed by a chorus of journalists, commentators, and the general public at large – became the Iraqi threat it ostensibly referred to.
First World War propaganda and the birth of post-truth culture
If there’s a historical moment that could be plausibly said to mark the birth of post-truth culture, it was the moment during which – a century before post-truth would develop into Word of the 12 months – the USA, led by President Woodrow Wilson, swung from neutrality to all-out intervention within the First World War. In November 1916 Wilson was re-elected on the strength of a campaign whose primary mantra was ‘He Kept Us Out of the War’ (Kennedy 2004, 12). But just just a few months later, the very man who ‘owed his victory’ to this slogan, reversed his policy of neutrality 180 degrees (Kennedy 2004, 12). In a famous address on 2 April 1917, Wilson implored the US Congress to declare war on Germany, intoning one other memorable talking point: ‘The World Must Be Made Secure for Democracy’ (Kennedy 2004, 42).
Wilson was understandably anxious that the American people wouldn’t rally behind the war effort. In any case, the reason behind neutrality was highly popular, or else he may not have won re-election by intoning that he kept America out of the war. Furthermore, thousands and thousands of Americans – including ethnic Germans, Irish, and Jews – sympathised with the German side and/or harboured intense antipathy toward Britain and Russia, America’s newfound allies. Against this backdrop, and within the absence of a transparent and present danger to the US homeland, ‘the Wilson administration was compelled to cultivate – even to fabricate – public opinion favourable to the war effort’ (Kennedy 2004, 46)
The administration thus launched an enormous propaganda campaign – led by a recent federal agency called the Committee on Public Information (CPI) – to sell the war to the American people. The CPI used newspapers, magazines, posters, radio, and films to spark patriotic emotions and drum up enthusiasm for the war. Moreover, the CPI sponsored and trained 75,000 ‘4-Minute Men’ who made thousands and thousands of short speeches across the country in support of the war effort. These speakers didn’t make rational arguments that appealed to the intellect of their listeners – it’s virtually unattainable to present a persuasive argument supported by detailed evidence in 4 minutes. What the speakers moderately did was to repeatedly chant talking points and key phrases. For instance, repeating the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ in association with the USA while repeating words like ‘beast’ and ‘atrocity’ in association with the German enemy. As historian David Kennedy wrote, by early 1918 the CPI-guided short speeches became evocative of the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ exercises that George Orwell would describe in his novel 1984. The CPI ‘urged participatory “4-Minute singing” to maintain patriotism at “white heat”’ (Kennedy 2004, 62).
From selling war to selling products and political candidates
The propaganda campaign orchestrated by the Wilson administration succeeded in generating public enthusiasm for the war effort. This gave some participants within the campaign the concept that the identical techniques that proved so effective in selling the war to the American people might be used profitably to sell consumer products. Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and a CPI propaganda operative, became convinced that ‘if this might be used for war, it may possibly be used for peace’ (Rifkin 1991). Bernays enjoyed a protracted and successful profession as one in every of America’s leading experts in promoting, marketing, and public relations. He is commonly called the ‘father of public relations’ (Rifkin 1991).
The successful selling of US military intervention in Europe to a public that previously supported non-intervention was a pivotal event that ushered within the age of mass marketing, an age during which sellers of products were not content with providing facts about their products. Within the mass consumer society that regularly took shape within the many years after World War I, the marketplace became characterised less by selling goods than by the aggressive marketing of brands, less by providing fact-based arguments a few product than by fostering emotional identification with values symbolised by brand names and icons/logos. For instance, purchasers of Nike trainers don’t only buy dependable athletic shoes, in addition they buy into values equivalent to determination, dynamism, and funky (Johnson 2012, 3). Arguably the principal characteristic of contemporary mass marketing campaigns – a characteristic ‘so obvious’ that its significance is ‘sometimes neglected’ (Cook 1992, 227) – is repetition. Repetition, repetition, repetition.
Advertisers bombard us with symbols equivalent to brand logos (the Nike swoosh), icons (Marlboro Man; Mr. Clean), and taglines (‘Just do it’; ‘Intel Inside’). These are repeated again and again with the aim that they’d develop into etched in our minds like earworms – catchy tunes that involuntarily and repetitively play in our heads. Because the political and company consultant Frank Luntz explained in his book Words that Work, the marketing messages that develop into stuck in our heads are typically temporary and straightforward. Effective advertisers don’t use a sentence when a phrase will do, they usually use abbreviations at any time when possible: ‘essentially the most unforgettable catchphrases … contain only
single- or at essentially the most two-syllable words. And once they initially haven’t been so easy, someone has stepped in to shorten them’. Thus, the Macintosh computer became Mac. Similarly, Federal Express, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and British Petroleum abbreviated their official names to FedEx, KFC, and BP (Luntz 2007, 6–7). The purpose is just not that marketing campaigns never misfire – the history of promoting is rife with failures. But of those campaigns that succeed, perhaps their most remarkable feature is that the verbal and visual symbols spouted by the marketers unite with the brand being marketed. As Luntz put it, ‘Essentially the most successful taglines aren’t seen as slogans for a product. They are the product’ (Luntz 2007, 98; emphasis original). Similarly, enduring corporate icons equivalent to the Marlboro Man and the Energizer Bunny ‘aren’t shills attempting to talk us into buying’ a pack of cigarettes or a package of batteries. ‘Identical to essentially the most celebrated slogans, they are the products’ (Luntz 2007, 100; emphases original). Although Luntz is a practical man, not a philosopher, his argument can readily be translated into the idiom of the philosophy of language. Luntz mainly says that the verbal symbols repeatedly uttered by advertisers sometimes perform successful illocutionary speech acts (Austin and Urmson 2009). In other words, these phrases develop into the things they ostensibly confer with. They create reality moderately than merely describe a pre-existing factual reality.
As mass marketing and promoting techniques became ubiquitous within the business marketplace, they increasingly migrated to other social spheres. As French philosopher Francois Baudrillard wrote in 1981, ‘All current modes of activity tend toward … the form of promoting, that of a simplified operational mode, vaguely seductive, vaguely consensual’ (Baudrillard 1994, 87; emphasis original). Baudrillard further observed that politics absorbed the operational mode of promoting more fully than other spheres. In contemporary society, ‘there isn’t a longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the identical language reigns in each’ (Baudrillard 1994, 88). Returning now from the French philosopher to the American practitioner, Luntz wrote almost as if Baudrillard were guiding his hand: ‘It’s hard to inform who’s in greater demand today: the Madison Avenue branding experts who’re brought in to show political parties methods to define themselves, or the political consultants brought into corporate boardrooms to show businesses methods to communicate more effectively’. Madison Avenue techniques, Luntz added, ‘firmly took hold in Washington throughout the Reagan years – they usually proceed to drive our politics today’ (Luntz 2007, 72).
Luntz could have been too cautious in dating the wedding of Madison Avenue and Washington to the Reagan years. In reality, as US presidency scholar Samuel Popkin noted, ‘Working to develop a brand name … has all the time been part and parcel of preparing for a run at higher offices’ (Popkin 2012, 23). And since at the least 1952, when an infectious tagline written by a marketing executive – ‘I like Ike’ – powered Dwight Eisenhower to the presidency (Peterson 2009, 66), the branding strategies of US presidential candidates have prominently included the spouting forth of catchphrases: ‘It’s morning again in America’ (Reagan, 1984); ‘It’s the economy, silly’ (Clinton, 1992); ‘Yes, we are able to!’ (Obama, 2008); ‘Make America great again’ (Trump, 2016). Indeed, inasmuch as his last name was a recognisable brand long before Donald Trump entered politics, his 2016 presidential campaign took the unification of name and product (political candidate) to a recent level.
To recapitulate my argument thus far, a central feature of post-truth culture – the repetition of talking points that don’t merely describe a factual reality but create reality – has been a part of American social, economic, and political life for a lot of many years. The shaping of reality through repetitive spouting of words and symbols is just not confined to domestic affairs. In reality, the origins of what’s now called ‘post-truth politics’ return to the campaign to sell America’s intervention in World War I to the American people.
Back to selling war, in Iraq: WMD, WMD, WMD
In the rest of this chapter, drawing on Oren and Solomon (2013; 2015), I return to US foreign relations and deal with a newer case during which a government-orchestrated propaganda campaign successfully drummed-up enthusiasm for a war. I consciously use ‘drum-up’ because this campaign was metaphorically tantamount to the rhythmic beating of war drums. The campaign succeeded not by providing the American individuals with a fact-based argument a few foreign threat, which the general public in turn considered rationally and located persuasive. It moderately succeeded by continually repeating a catchphrase (or talking point) and by virtue of the incessant repetition of the catchphrase by the media and the general public at large, which created a metaphorical drumbeat, or a choral chant: weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, WMD, WMD, WMD. The choral incantation of the phrase performed an illocutionary speech act, that’s, it didn’t merely describe a threat a lot because it created and shaped a reality of a grave, existential danger.
Within the aftermath of 11 September 2001, although the mastermind of the attacks was based in Afghanistan, the George W. Bush administration began depicting Iraq as a grave menace to US and world security. Through the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, the central theme of the administration’s case against Iraq was the danger of Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Starting with the January 2002 State of the Union address, Bush and senior administration officials uttered this phrase multiple times in most of their public appearances.
In August 2002 the White House was placed on the defensive by a growing opposition galvanised by an opinion article within the Wall Street Journal. Titled ‘Don’t Bomb Saddam’, the article was authored by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, a confidante of the president’s father. To regain momentum, the White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, convened a high- level group whose mission was to market a war in Iraq. Although the formation of this group – the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) – was not made public, Card hinted at its task on 6 September 2002, when he told the Latest York Times that ‘From a marketing viewpoint, you don’t introduce recent products in August’. Among the many members of the WHIG were several specialists in strategic communication, including the president’s senior political advisor, Karl Rove. In candid comments quoted by Latest York Times author Ron Suskind in late 2004, Rove said that that journalists like Suskind lived ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which Rove defined as ‘individuals who “imagine that solutions emerge out of your judicious study of discernible reality”’. Rove added that the world doesn’t work like this anymore:
We’re an empire now, and after we act, we create our own reality. And when you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you’ll – we’ll act again, creating other recent realities, which you’ll be able to study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and also you, all of you, might be left to only study what we do (Suskind 2004).
Whether or not he ever studied the philosophy of language, Rove’s comment appeared like he had a solid grasp of the concept of speech act.
The WHIG coordinated a dramatic public relations offensive to sell the war to the American public. With the launching of this campaign, the usage of the talking point ‘weapons of mass destruction’ by administration officials increased markedly. In an appearance on CNN on the campaign’s first day – 8 September 2002 – National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice uttered the phrase 13 times. In a televised prime-time speech in Cincinnati a month later, Bush alluded to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ eight times in 26 minutes. On 3 January 2003, chatting with troops in Fort Hood, Texas, Bush said:
The Iraqi regime has used weapons of mass destruction. They not only had weapons of mass destruction, they used weapons of mass destruction. They used weapons of mass destruction in other countries, they’ve used weapons of mass destruction on their very own people. That’s why I say Iraq is a threat, an actual threat.
The persistent repetition of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was, subsequently, a central aspect of the Bush administration’s campaign to sell the Iraq war to the American people. Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, the one Republican senator who opposed the war, was hardly exaggerating when he later complained that the administration’s case for invading Iraq consisted in a ‘regular drumbeat of weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction’.
To develop into unified with the threat that it ostensibly referred to, it was not enough for the phrase to be repeated by the administration. To effectively create a menacing reality, this phrase needed to be accepted and adopted by its audience – the media and the general public at large. And indeed, before too long, ‘weapons of mass destruction’ became a each day staple of the American press. As Figure 4.1 shows, the frequency with which the Wall Street Journal printed this phrase was virtually zero within the Nineteen Eighties and moderate within the Nineteen Nineties before spiking dramatically in 2002 and 2003. The same pattern was characteristic of other leading newspapers. And, as illustrated by figure 4.2, throughout the twelve months preceding the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 the incidence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in leading US publications has increased almost tenfold. Much of this increase coincided with the launching of the federal government’s marketing campaign in early September 2002. No before it flooded the US media, the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ invaded the on a regular basis talk of odd Americans at work, at home, and so forth. This linguistic invasion was evidenced by the proven fact that the American Dialect Society chosen the phrase as its 2002 ‘Word of the 12 months’, that’s, the 12 months’s most ‘newly distinguished or notable’ vocabulary item.
As noted earlier, in business marketing, a few of the most memorable brand names are abbreviations: CNN; KFC, FedEx. And, just as these corporations have profited from the abridgment of their names, so has the marketing of the Iraq war benefitted from the abbreviation of the flabby ‘weapons of mass destruction’ right into a trim acronym, WMD. Whereas the acronym WMD almost never appeared in America’s major newspapers within the Nineteen Nineties, throughout the lead-up to the Iraq War the identical newspapers printed this abbreviation a whole bunch of times. Because the war approached, the acronym became so commonplace that reporters and commentators not felt compelled to spell it out (that’s, they increasingly referred to WMD in the identical manner that they routinely confer with, say, CNN without spelling out Cable News Network). The drumbeat echoed by the media became peppier: WMD, WMD, WMD.
In an insightful ‘note on abridgment’, Marcuse wrote that, at the same time as abbreviations perform a superbly reasonable function of simplifying speech – it is easier to say NATO than North Atlantic Treaty Organization – in addition they perform an not noticeable rhetorical function: ‘help[ing] to repress undesired questions’. For instance,
NATO doesn’t suggest what North Atlantic Treaty Organization says, namely a treaty among the many nations on the North Atlantic – during which case one might ask questions on the membership of Greece and Turkey (Marcuse 1991, 94).
Consistent with Marcuse’s evaluation, the popularisation of WMD helped ‘repress undesired questions’ surrounding administration statements equivalent to (in President Bush’s words) ‘They used weapons of mass destruction in other countries, they’ve used weapons of mass destruction on their very own people’. Because WMD elides the words ‘mass destruction’, the growing prominence of the abbreviation in public discourse made it less likely that individuals would stop their chanting to ask questions like: can poison gas – the weapon that the above statement interchanged ‘weapons of mass destruction’ for – truly cause ‘mass destruction’ at the same time as gas cannot destroy property? Did the gas the Iraqi regime use against ‘its own people’ really cause ‘mass destruction’? Could the employment of chemical weapons by Iraq truly pose a grave danger to the safety of the USA? In sum, the incantation of abbreviations like WMD perform the rhetorical function of taking us even further away from concrete factual reality than the chanting of the complete phrase.
Abbreviation aside, some readers may wonder: Isn’t ‘weapons of mass destruction’ a transparent and unproblematic reference to alleged ‘facts on the bottom’ in Iraq? Can’t we simply check the facts and determine whether it was true that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction? Indeed, this was precisely how the US public debate was framed within the war’s aftermath: did Iraq truly possess these weapons? If not, did the Bush administration mislead the American people (and the world) or merely suffer an unintentional intelligence failure? But I need to suggest that checking facts about weapons of mass destruction is just not so easy because, like other common terms in US foreign policy discourse, this phrase is ambiguous and has multiple meanings. What exactly is supposed by rogue state? Axis of evil? Ethnic cleansing? Soft/smart power? The meaning of such terms, like that of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, is more equivocal and historically variable than one might think. They’re, in other words, empty signifiers.
When the term ‘weapons of mass destruction’ first appeared in diplomatic documents and within the US press in November 1945, it had no clear definition. In subsequent arms control negotiations held on the United Nations, diplomats and commentators debated a big selection of definitions before the UN Commission on Conventional Armament resolved in 1948 that ‘weapons of mass destruction’ included atomic, radiological, biological, and chemical weapons, in addition to future weapons able to comparable destruction. Through the Cold War, nonetheless, the phrase receded from public view and, on the rare occasions it was mentioned within the US press, it was typically related to nuclear weapons alone. The phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was entirely absent from media reporting on instances during which chemical agents were undoubtedly utilized in warfare, including the widespread use of riot control agents and herbicides by the USA in Vietnam. Nor was the phrase mentioned in US press reporting on the usage of poison gas by the Egyptian air force in Yemen, which resulted in a whole bunch of civilian deaths. Most strikingly, in contrast with President Bush’s statement in 2003 that ‘The Iraqi regime has used weapons of mass destruction’, this term was utterly omitted from US press reporting within the Nineteen Eighties on Iraq’s lethal chemical warfare against Iran and against its own Kurdish population.
Within the Nineteen Nineties, ‘weapons of mass destruction’ made a minor comeback into US foreign policy discourse since the phrase was incorporated into the 1991 UN Security Council resolution that set the terms of the Gulf War ceasefire and imposed an arms inspection regime on Iraq. At the identical time, the phrase jumped from the realm of foreign relations to the text of an enormous anticrime law passed by the US Congress. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 defined weapons of mass destruction in far broader terms than those of the UN’s 1948 definition, including, for instance, any conventional ‘bomb, grenade, rocket having a propellant charge of greater than 4 ounces’. Based on this laws, federal prosecutors began pressing WMD charges repeatedly not only against terrorism suspects equivalent to ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid but additionally in cases involving petty domestic crime. For example, a short while after the US invaded Iraq to remove the existential threat of WMD, a person from Pennsylvania was sent to prison for mailing his former doctor a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ assembled from ‘black gunpowder, a carbon dioxide cartridge, a nine-volt battery … and dental floss’.
‘Weapons of mass destruction’, then, is an ambiguous figure of speech, an empty signifier. Throughout its history the meaning of the phrase has been contested and changeable. It has had multiple meanings and it has meant various things to different people. Moreover, even when foreign policy experts could have had a transparent idea of their minds of what the term meant, the actual fact stays that before the Bush administration began intoning this term in 2002, most Americans have either never heard it or, in the event that they have, they didn’t share a transparent concept of what it precisely meant.
Here, I need to make a vital point. As older readers may recall, the Iraq War was a divisive issue in American politics and a large minority of Americans adamantly opposed the invasion. Yet the chanting of WMD, WMD, WMD, transcended the political divide because opponents of the war, too, embraced the term, repeating it reflexively and uncritically. For instance, speaking on the identical CNN program during which Condoleezza Rice kicked off the campaign to sell the Iraq war to the American people, Senator Bob Graham – a Democrat from Florida who would later vote against authorising the war – uttered ‘weapons of mass destruction’ seven times.
By joining the chorus chanting ‘WMD’, the opponents of the war helped consolidate a generalised atmosphere of danger at the same time as they weren’t persuaded by the Bush administration’s case for war. When Americans were asked by pollsters whether or not they supported or opposed the usage of force against Iraq, the outcomes were exceptionally stable over time. In survey after survey conducted throughout 2002 and early 2003, slightly below sixty percent of the respondents expressed support for an invasion while just over a 3rd of them indicated opposition. Remarkably, the launching of the administration’s war marketing campaign in September 2002 made virtually no dent on this pattern. There’s little evidence, then, that the administration persuaded the American people to alter their minds concerning the Iraqi threat. The invasion of Iraq was sold to the American people not by making them think together a lot as by making each proponents and opponents of the war move their lips together: WMD, WMD, WMD. The collective chanting of this phrase within the mass media echoed and scaled up the participatory patriotic singing conducted in 1917–1918 by ‘4-Minute Men’ in public squares across the country.
Readers acquainted with contemporary International Relations scholarship could have noticed that my argument dovetails with two theoretical innovations which have gained resonance within the discipline in recent many years. First, my claim that the chanting of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ performed a speech act evokes the concept of securitisation (Wæver 1995) which theorises that national security threats don’t exist prior to language; moderately, a problem becomes a threat by being named as such. More specifically, a problem becomes successfully ‘securitised’ when state officials pronounce it a security threat and when an ‘audience’ accepts the officials’ pronouncement. The case of Iraq’s securitisation in 2003, that’s, the successful elevation of the Iraqi issue to the extent of a grave menace to US national security, suggests that proclaiming an object a security threat may take the shape of ‘repeated assertion of talking points’. Furthermore, this case suggests that the audience’s acceptance consists not only in being persuaded by securitising talk but additionally, importantly, in actively participating within the performance of the talking points. Second, my evaluation of the selling of the Iraq War to the American public dovetails with the ‘practice turn’ in International Relations theory (Adler and Pouliot 2011).
The underlying intuition of the practice turn is that ‘social realities – and international politics – are constituted by human beings acting in and on the world’ (Cournot, n.d.). Human beings, in other words, form their beliefs and knowledge concerning the world through routine performance of fabric practices. Informed by this attitude, critics of Wæver’s theorisation argued that objects/issues develop into securitised not through speech a lot as through routinised performance of fabric practices ‘equivalent to programming algorithms, routine collection of knowledge, and looking out at CCTV footage’ (Huysmans 2011, 372). My evaluation suggests that securitisation performed in speech and securitisation performed in material practice aren’t mutually exclusive. The social reality of Iraq as being an existential security threat was shaped directly by the repetitive uttering of the words and by the fabric acts of lips moving and fingers tapping on keyboards together: WMD, WMD, WMD.
I conclude this section by quoting from a magazine column published shortly after the invasion of Iraq. On the time, a loud and acrimonious debate was going down on whether Iraq truly possessed weapons of mass destruction and, if it didn’t, whether the claims of the administration were a lie or merely the product of an unintentional intelligence failure. Amid the din of the talk, Michael Kinsley was the one voice who recognised WMD for the securitising speech act that it was (even when he didn’t use this term).
By now, WMD have taken on a mythic role during which fact doesn’t play much of an element. The phrase itself – ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – is more like an incantation than an outline of anything particularly. The term is a recent one to almost everybody, and the priority it officially embodies was on almost nobody’s radar screen until recently. Unofficially, ‘weapons of mass destruction’ are to George W. Bush what fairies were to Peter Pan. He wants us to say, ‘We DO imagine in weapons of mass destruction. We DO imagine. We DO’. If all of us imagine hard enough, they might be there. And it’s working (Kinsley 2003).
With Kinsley, I argue that the incessant incantation of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ by the Bush administration, and the ricocheting of the phrase through the echo chamber of the mass media, emptied it of any specific meaning. Just because the repetition of liturgical texts serves to divert the worshipper’s mind from his worldly situation and to affirm the axioms of his belief, so did the incantation of ‘WMD’ make Americans take the existence of those weapons as an article of religion, distracting the American mind from the realities of the Middle East. Furthermore, just because the chanting of a mantra lifts the chanter above material reality and promotes the actualisation of the concept being uttered, so did the collective chant ‘weapons of mass destruction’ rhetorically create the Iraqi threat as much because it referred to such a threat.
Conclusion
On this chapter, I called attention to a central element of post-truth culture: the displacement of reality-based arguments by reality-shaping repetition of talking points, taglines, and catchphrases. I argued that the birth of this culture could also be traced back to the propaganda campaign launched by the Wilson administration in 1917 to rally the US public behind the US intervention within the Great War. Following the campaign’s success, the propaganda methods it employed – including, prominently, the repetitive spouting of catchphrases – were perfected in business marketing and political campaigning only to be reapplied to the marketing of foreign wars. The Bush Administration’s 2002–2003 campaign to sell the Iraq War to the US public through repeating the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ echoed and outperformed the anti-German chants of the Wilson Administration’s ‘4-Minute Men’. The choral chanting of WMD, WMD, WMD by the Bush administration, the media, and the general public had little to do with communicating objective facts about an Iraqi threat. As an alternative, the chorus successfully securitised Iraq, singing the threat into existence.
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